when served, so to speak, au naturel. One had seen good solid slices of
fiction, well endued, one might surely have thought, with this easiest
of lubrications, deplored by editor and publisher as positively not, for
the general gullet as known to THEM, made adequately "slick."
"'Dialogue,' always 'dialogue'!" I had seemed from far back to hear them
mostly cry: "We can't have too much of it, we can't have enough of it,
and no excess of it, in the form of no matter what savourless dilution,
or what boneless dispersion, ever began to injure a book so much as even
the very scantest claim put in for form and substance." This wisdom had
always been in one's ears; but it had at the same time been equally in
one's eyes that really constructive dialogue, dialogue organic and
dramatic, speaking for itself, representing and embodying substance and
form, is among us an uncanny and abhorrent thing, not to be dealt with
on any terms. A comedy or a tragedy may run for a thousand nights
without prompting twenty persons in London or in New York to desire that
view of its text which is so desired in Paris, as soon as a play begins
to loom at all large, that the number of copies of the printed piece in
circulation far exceeds at last the number of performances. But as with
the printed piece our own public, infatuated as it may be with the
theatre, refuses all commerce--though indeed this can't but be, without
cynicism, very much through the infirmity the piece, IF printed, would
reveal--so the same horror seems to attach to any typographic hint of
the proscribed playbook or any insidious plea for it. The immense oddity
resides in the almost exclusively typographic order of the offence. An
English, an American Gyp would typographically offend, and that would be
the end of her. THERE gloomed at me my warning, as well as shone at me
my provocation, in respect to the example of this delightful writer. I
might emulate her, since I presumptuously would, but dishonour would
await me if, proposing to treat the different faces of my subject in the
most completely instituted colloquial form, I should evoke the figure